There’s something about hearing songs you’ve known and loved for years played by an orchestra. Euphoric trance songs such as the setlist at hand can be emotional anyway, but a full orchestra brings that emotion front and centre and smacks you right between the eyes.
Take for example Robert Miles’ Children or Energy 52’s Café Del Mar you’d be hard-pressed not to weep as scenes of Ibiza and days on the white island gone by flash in front of the Heritage Orchestra and the man that brought it all together, Pete Tong.
There was raw emotion and then there was just pure party time. Galvanize, Killer, 9pm (Til I Come), a surprise version of Daft Punk’s One More Time, absolute crowd favourite Insomnia that brought the roof clean off, I can’t physically remember a time being happier in amongst the great unwashed. And my goodness weren’t we all up for it.
They came clattering on to the stage performing Right Here, Right Now and continued to please song after song after song. I don’t think a single person in the Arena wanted to go home, and rightly so.
A new tour has been announced next year in November and honestly, if you’re not there you need to question what you’re doing with yourself, because I can’t think of many other places where you will mind will be blown continuously or where you will have so much fun in one sitting (or standing, as no one even sat down in row Z.
Let’s not even talk about the incredible light show and pictures on the big screen that went with it because I may physically start crying all over again. If the emotion at the end of the show wasn’t enough anyway, punters relived their youthful Ibiza holidays back in ’93 with images of the clubs that made everything we were hearing spring dramatically to life.
10/10 Pete Tong, you’ve hit the nail well and truly on the head with this floor-filling, hair-raising, enraptured gift of a concert.
